Poetry

[Editor's note: In honour of M. Travis Lane being shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry, we're pleased to reprint with permission Shane Neilson's introduction to the retrospective of her work that appeared in last summer's poetry issue, No. 260, Summer 2014.]

In my mind, the palate for both techno and poetry is a massive suggestion for the two to fuse together and to create on a blank canvas. I foresee an opportunity, both in content and cultural relevance, to create something that is beautiful and authentic in both of these mediums coming together. They are both emotional experiences that could synthesize into a superpower of an emotional medium.

With electronic music’s meteoric rise over the past decade, the culture infiltrated the mainstream conscious, which came with its faults but ultimately benefited the culture as a whole. Techno became a cultural force taking over the lifestyles of the party demographics all over the continent. . . .

Poetry and techno are like two of my mind’s closest friends that continually flirt with each other to the point that I’m confused as to why they don’t just quit playing around and start dating. For a while, I thought this was something that only made sense to me, and that I should just keep my opinions to myself; however, when I came across an article in The Atlantic, titled "The Death of the Artist” by William Deresiewicz, I began to think that this is a match that is more plausible than I first thought it would be in a real world setting.

Sean Howard has won our 24th annual Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem for "Cases (Unbound Poems, from Nova Scotia Reports)." Sean Howard is the author of Local Calls (Cape Breton University Press, 2009) and Incitements (Gaspereau Press, 2011). His poetry has been published in numerous Canadian and international magazines, nominated for a Pushcart Prize in the US, and anthologized in The Best Canadian Poetry in English (Tightrope Books, 2011 & 2014). Sean lives in the lobster-fishing village of Main-à-Dieu, Nova Scotia, and is adjunct professor of political science at Cape Breton University.

One evening in mid-February, the Cinnamon Café in downtown Fredericton was overrun with poets. The occasion was a Spoken Word Poetry Night, and while poetry events are normally notorious for drawing small crowds, the King Street café quickly ran out of seating. . . .

A Review of Carmelita McGraw's Escape Velocity (Goose Lane, 2013) I was reminded, in reading through Escape Velocity, of the cultural and aural vernacular that’s so much a part of the literary geography of Newfoundland. The trick, I think, with any brogue, is to try and do it justice without putting the idiomatic phrases and language used in jeopardy of being considered a caricature. McGrath deftly straddles the line in this new collection, and her ability to recognize and resist the impulse to essentially reduce native Newfoundlanders to a comic commodity through exaggerated dialect is one of the book’s great achievements.

A Review of Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems, introduced, edited and translated by Emery George (Princeton UP, 2011) What is “nobility”? In a society, such as ours, that makes a fretful, often duplicitous, yet admirable pretence to democratic practice, the word may seem insistently, even discouragingly, to flaunt a feudal livery, contaminating all the situations into which we import it with the ghost of a titular presumption over the rest of society: an intractable case of most ancient bloodlines. But the origins of the word “noble” offer a means by which to parry, even to disarm, such narrow atavism.

By Phillip Crymble Kayla Czaga has won our 23rd annual Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem for "That Great-Upholstered Beacon of Dependability." Kayla Czaga won The Malahat Review’s 2012 Far Horizons Award for poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Walrus, The New Quarterly, Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012, Arc, and others. Her first book, For Your Safety Please Hold On, is forthcoming this fall from Nightwood Editions. She lives and writes in Vancouver, where she is completing her MFA at UBC.

I am a long-standing admirer of John Steffler's work. I find his beautifully crafted poems, with their deft use of language, visceral and epiphanic. The senses cannot help but come alive reading lines like "the tramped grass steamy as seaweed in the migraine / of noon" or "the bone flakes encrusting a bracelet / of kelp," but what sets this work apart is the understated manner in which it asks questions of the reader.

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